Darwin Stubs His T.O.E.

Either reality is given, spoken, and capable of
correcting us, or it is an emergent consensus generated
by process itself. There is no third alternative.

 

The Empire of Selection
from Quantum to Cosmic

By John D. Wise, PhD

Creation-Evolution Headlines readers may recall David Coppedge’s earlier article on Quantum Darwinism, where he examined a growing trend in physics to borrow Darwinian language to explain why certain quantum states appear stable while others fade away. He astutely concludes:

“Selectionism” has gotten so far out of hand, it is used on anything and everything in the universe. According to the selectionist, anything that exists has been naturally selected. The Darwinist can’t lose. Everything becomes evidence for his vacuous theory.

The move was presented by evolutionary theorists as a harmless metaphor: information about some states is “selected” because it is redundantly copied into the environment. David cautioned that this was not an innocent borrowing. Darwinian logic, once imported, does not remain merely descriptive. It begins to do explanatory work.

It begins, that is, to colonize.

In a sense, I have nothing new to add to David’s analysis. I can, however, provide some explanation as to why this move was inevitable.

Two recent scientific papers, one on the fuzziness of quantum mechanics and another on cosmological natural selection,[1] show exactly how far this colonial empire has expanded. In their attempt to crown Darwinism as a universal explanation, these researchers have inadvertently exposed the cost of that ambition: to explain everything by evolution, material reality itself must be redefined.

The Quantum Consensus: Reality as a “Fit” State

The first pillar of this takeover appears in a recent news article:

We have a new way to explain why we agree on the nature of reality (New Scientist, 27 January 2026). The problem physicists face is the well-known “fuzziness” of the quantum world: particles do not occupy single, well-defined states. How, then, does our stable, classical world arise from this underlying indeterminacy?

The authors’ answer is explicit:

Researchers have now developed a recipe for measuring how quickly the objective reality that we do experience emerges from this fuzziness, strengthening the case that a framework inspired by evolutionary principles can explain why it emerges at all.

This framing is decisive. Objective reality is no longer the starting point of scientific inquiry. It is something that emerges. And the mechanism invoked to explain that emergence is explicitly evolutionary. The article continues:

In the quantum realm, each object – such as a single atom – exists in a cloud of possible states and assumes a well-defined, or ‘classical’, state only after being measured or observed.

Taken at face value, this reverses the traditional direction of dependence. Classical reality no longer constrains observers. It is produced downstream of observation. The authors then draw their most consequential conclusion:

Even imperfect observers can eventually agree on an objective reality.

At this point, a basic methodological question must be asked: what must reality be like (metaphysics) for this statement to be true?

Here, objectivity is no longer grounded in correspondence to a mind-independent world, but in convergence among observers. Reality becomes what survives through consensus-fitness. If that is so, then there is no independent “muck” on the seafloor to which our descriptions must answer. There is only the fluid process of agreement itself. Materialism is thus “proven” only by redefining matter as a social-quantum artifact.

The Cosmic Gene: Spacetime as an Organism

This colonizing arc then swings to the opposite extreme. A 2025 paper proposes that we view the universe not as a creation, but as a “generalized organism”—

Adding genes and interaction to Smolin’s cosmological natural selection [1] (Ward Blondé, Springer Nature, 29 August, 2025). Taken at face value, the framework proposed here by Blondé implies that:

• Spacetime itself is a “gene.”
• The universe “self-reproduces abundantly” via black hole “propagules.”
• Intelligent beings (including us) are treated as ‘generalized proteins,’ components within the universe’s reproductive framework.

The irony here is chilling. In Colonial Darwinism, human consciousness is not even a bystander to the cosmos; it is just a cog in the reproductive machine. We are reduced from the Imago Dei – beings designed to perceive and steward the truth – to “generalized proteins” whose only value is our potential role in helping a 3+1 dimensional spacetime “organism” to replicate itself. Here, the fine-tuning of the laws of physics is not the signature of a Designer;[2] it is an ‘evolutionary fitness-adaptation.’ The laws of nature are inherited traits filtered by cosmic survival.

The Hollow Triumph

No one seems to note the irony.

By enthroning a materialist viewpoint, they have effectively ‘proven’ that only a non-materialist reality could have originated it – or to use their language, ‘caused it to emerge.’

If reality is a “consensus artifact” (Quantum Darwinism) and physical laws are “adaptive genes” (Cosmic Darwinism), then Process has entirely replaced Being. At this point, the philosophical structure behind these moves comes into sharp focus.

In a previous article, I argued that Darwinism was never merely a theory of biology. It is in its very DNA a form of process-metaphysics popularized by early 19^th century philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Its logic (usually called the Dialectic) embraces contradiction (A and not-A) in order to maintain the illusion of an immanent self-grounding, ever-ascending, autonomic reality. This logic is inherently colonial; it will not stop at the “water’s edge” of biology. By its own logic it must expand into a Theory of Everything (TOE).

Materialist science wanted a world without an originating Mind, but they ended up with a world that is nothing but the operation of Mind-like Process – a “logic” that creates objectivity as it goes.

This is the homily I have been preaching since I returned to Christ in 2019. We live in Hegel’s world, and too many of us think like Hegel, even those of us who oppose evolutionary science and secular culture.

The Darwinian TOE is a closed loop:

1. Biology is explained by Selection.
2. Quantum Reality is explained by Selection.
3. Cosmogony (and Cosmology) is explained by Selection

But what does “selection” mean if there is no stable reality doing the selecting? If even the environment (from quantum to cosmic) is an evolutionary product, who is selecting whom?

A process without residue acts upon nothing.

We speak for the residue.

We speak for the reality spoken into existence at Creation.

We speak for the Logos, God’s image borne by every son of Adam and daughter of Eve.

In the biblical worldview, reality is not a consensus artifact that emerges from imperfect observers. It is a spoken artifact grounded in the perfect observation of the Creator.

In these two papers we see the crisis of secular science today. The materialist is being driven back toward idealism because ‘material’ is no longer tenable as an ultimate category. Concurrently, biology itself is being forced by complexity to acknowledge purpose and design.

The enormous and still largely unacknowledged cost of Darwin’s Empire of Denial is the loss of science itself. When data and empiricism are replaced by consensus and process, when explanation requires both A and not-A, science ceases to be an inquiry into truth and becomes a tool of worldview colonialism.

Either reality is given, spoken, and capable of correcting us, or it is an emergent consensus generated by process itself.

There is no third alternative.

Reality has stubbed Darwin’s TOE.

[1] First proposed by theoretical physicist Lee Smolin in 1992, and further detailed in his 1997 book The Life of the Cosmos, Cosmological Natural Selection (CNS) attempts to explain the “fine-tuning” of the universe’s physical constants without recourse to the Anthropic Principle or, critically, to a Designer. Smolin’s model relies on three primary pillars: 1) Reproduction: New “baby universes” are born inside black holes. The singularity of a black hole in a “parent” universe triggers a Big Bang in a “child” universe, creating a branching lineage of spacetimes. 2) Variation: The fundamental constants of physics (e.g., the strength of gravity, the mass of the electron) are not fixed but undergo slight, random “mutations” during the transition from parent to child. 3) Selection: Universes whose constants are “fit” for producing many black holes will have more offspring. Over vast stretches of “cosmic time,” the population of universes in the multiverse becomes dominated by those optimized for black hole production. Smolin argues that because the conditions required to produce black holes – such as the existence of heavy elements like carbon and the longevity of stars – are nearly identical to the conditions required for life, human existence is a ‘natural byproduct’ of the universe’s own reproductive success.

[2] This is, of course, by design, as Richard Lewontin so eloquently told us. “Science” today is more preoccupied with the process of denial than that of discovery, at least at the theoretical level.

The Unbroken Chain of Speech: Reality as Spoken, not Selected

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John Wise received his PhD in philosophy from the University of CA, Irvine in 2004. His dissertation was titled Sartre’s Phenomenological Ontology and the German Idealist Tradition. His area of specialization is 19th to early 20th century continental philosophy.

He tells the story of his 25-year odyssey from atheism to Christianity in the book, Through the Looking Glass: The Imploding of an Atheist Professor’s Worldview (available on Amazon). Since his return to Christ, his research interests include developing a Christian (YEC) philosophy of science and the integration of all human knowledge with God’s word.

He has taught philosophy for the University of CA, Irvine, East Stroudsburg University of PA, Grand Canyon University, American Intercontinental University, and Ashford University. He currently teaches online for the University of Arizona, Global Campus, and is a member of the Heterodox Academy. He and his wife Jenny are known online as The Christian Atheist with a podcast of that name, in addition to a YouTube channel: John and Jenny Wise.